Wexner to screen newsreel of '19 World Series found buried in Canada

Thursday

Apr 10, 2014 at 12:01 AMApr 10, 2014 at 12:50 PM

Call it a cinematic version of buried treasure. After spending decades trapped in the Canadian permafrost, along with thousands of feet of other footage, a newsreel clip from the 1919 World Series will be shown at the "Rare Baseball Films" program at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Terry Mikesell, The Columbus Dispatch

Call it a cinematic version of buried treasure.

After spending decades trapped in the Canadian permafrost, along with thousands of feet of other footage, a newsreel clip from the 1919 World Series will be shown at the “Rare Baseball Films” program at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

The 1919 World Series was overshadowed by the infamous “Black Sox” scandal, in which members of the Chicago White Sox allegedly threw the series to the Cincinnati Reds. No one was convicted, but several of the White Sox admitted to accepting bribes from gamblers.

“I’m not aware of there being any other footage of the 1919 World Series,” said filmmaker Bill Morrison, who found the clip in the Canadian national archive, “yet it’s inspired who-knows-how-many Hollywood movies.”

The clip, which is almost five minutes long, is only a small part of the 70-minute “Rare Baseball Films” program, but the back story is fascinating.

According to a 2013 story in the Yukon News; the website the Biosphere; and Morrison, who is working on Dawson City: Frozen Time, an upcoming movie about the discovered films:

Dawson City is a town in the remote Canadian Yukon about 250 miles east of Fairbanks, Alaska.

At the turn of the 20th century, among the few diversions there were movies shown by traveling showmen. In 1910, a movie house opened, bringing short films and newsreels.

Dawson was the end of the line for movies. By the time the films reached the Yukon, they were hopelessly out of date, and studios found it less expensive to print new films than to ship the old ones back from the Canadian northwest.

Cans of footage stacked up. For a while, they were stored in the basement of the library, but nitrate film emits explosive vapors as it deteriorates.

Rather than risk watching the town library blow up, in 1929 city leaders considered how to get rid of the films.

Instead of tossing the films in the Yukon River — a preferred disposal method at the time — more than 500 cans of film were used as filler in a swimming pool that was being converted into a hockey rink.

The old pool was topped with dirt and the rink surface, creating a virtual movie-preservation vault.

“You couldn’t find better conditions,” Morrison said. “The ones in the top were damaged by seepage, but the ones in the bottom were packed pretty well.”

In 1978, the rink was bulldozed, revealing the cache of films.

The footage was sent by truck to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon, but no commercial airliner would risk moving the volatile stock. Finally, a Canadian Air Force plane flew the film to the Ottawa area. The Libraries and Archives Canada and the U.S. Library of Congress restored 500,000 feet of footage, image by image, and transferred it onto stable media.

The footage, including the 1919 World Series clip, sat in the Canadian archives in Gatineau, Quebec, until January, when Morrison, who was researching his upcoming film, stumbled across a clip labeled “1919 World Series.”

“I’m a White Sox fan,” Morrison said. “I’m from the South Side of Chicago, so when I saw the ‘ 1919 World Series,’ I perked up.”

Morrison, who has visited the Wexner Center for the Arts several times and knew about the annual baseball program, sent an email to David Filipi, film/video director at the Wexner Center.

“I said: ‘Yeah, this is great. I wish I could include it in my baseball program,’?” Filipi said.

Although the edges of the film have deteriorated, most of the frames are visible, showing action and crowd shots and overhead footage of Comiskey Park in Chicago taken from an airplane.

“Lots of films are considered lost,” said Filipi, who didn’t know of any other existing films of the 1919 World Series, “and people like me, or archivists, always hold out hope that, somewhere in the world, there’s going to be something like this.”

tmikesel@dispatch.com

@TerryMikesell

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